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WEBINAR:On-Demand

"A multi-billion dollar industry was created, by
accident, from something invented for a completely different
purpose. Unforeseen by RMS, it just happens that the economics of
open source, which reduces the opportunity cost of obtaining
software by trading in source code instead of money, is
fundamentally sound. Business created on the foundation of
fundamentally sound economics is bound to be successful. In
retrospect, it can be seen that there was little doubt that Red Hat
would be successful.

"Alas, conditions today are very different than they were in the
80’s and 90’s when the open source movement was
growing. The early adopters, i.e., the developers that contributed
to open source were able to translate their labour into financial
benefits by working for companies like Red Hat or founding their
own companies. These early adopters possessed a scarce resource,
open source knowledge, that they were able to trade for employment
and ownership. Today, that resource has become abundant, and global
economics means that those jobs are sent offshore, and the ROI for
technology workers in the G8 countries is limited."